


Pockmarks on the Moon

by togina



Series: Howling Commandos [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen, Lynching, M/M, Multi, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Racism, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 01:36:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5608861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Howling Commandos don’t hold with baloney like mystical dreams—that’s Stark’s job, they say, because they all know that Stark is fighting the Cold War for the Arctic, for a chance to drain the ocean and maybe, maybe find Steve.  (They don’t say that Stark can call them omens because he doesn’t know that all soldiers’ dreams portend nothing but death already rendered, the dreams where Steve is screaming, James’s shoulder hanging on by the ligaments, where Monty is covered in James’s blood and the doctors think they’ll have to take the whole arm—there’s nothing mystical about those dreams at all, when those last few weeks Steve screamed every time he closed his eyes.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pockmarks on the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> This was CaliFornia's prompt, originally posted on tumblr, [here](http://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/134673213578/oh-ok-so-you-love-the-commandos-too-but-you).
> 
> This story is canon-compliant with everyone's death in _Captain America: The First Avenger_ , so it's heavy on the angst.
> 
> Heed the warnings! This is the 1940s: there is lynching, in Gabe's Southern childhood, and there are Nazi atrocities in Jacques's past.

Gabe stops sleeping, after the Alps. He doesn’t mean to; Dum Dum has always joked that Gabe could sleep under fire from a tommy gun with a smile on his face, has said it so many times that Gabe half believes it himself. He has slept on the cold, concrete floors of a prison cell, on a layer of fresh snow and old ice, in one of Stark’s rickety planes hanging onto the cargo netting so that they don’t all tumble out the rear hatch.

It’s not nightmares. Not the first night. It’s just that there’s so much to do—so much _more_ to do than he realized, because it was Sarge’s job to make sure Jim remembered to radio base, and it was Sarge’s job to herd the Commandos off to the laundry, and to drop by the commissary for rations and celebratory cigarettes for all the men. It wasn’t Sarge’s job to pick Cap up and haul him out of the hangar, to pry the shield out of his numb hands and offer him a stiff drink and an awkward pat on the back, but it was something else Gabe had to do. (And he hated Barnes then, just a little, the anger building behind his eyes and up his throat like tears Gabe hadn’t cried since he was six years old. Hated Barnes for leaving them with Rogers’s untameable grief. For leaving them behind.)

The Commandos whispered the entire trip home, as though one loud curse would shatter Cap like a porcelain figurine. It didn’t matter, though. Cap didn’t even notice they were there. “What do we do?” Jim asked, glancing furtively at their squad commander from under his cap.

Jackie had snorted, the lines around his mouth deeper than they had been only a few hours before. “We report to ze Colonel,” he answered, prominent Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. “Zen we eat dinner, and lay in our beds.” He flicked his hand out, sharp and sudden, as if to demonstrate the forward march of soldiers through one evening and into the day beyond. “And when we wake, it will be morning. And we will breakfast, and wait until it is morning again.”

Nazi forces had entered Marseille on a Thursday in November, 1942. They had looted Jackie’s home in Vieux-Port, deported his father as a criminal, and broken his mother’s heart when they blasted her entire neighborhood to rubble and ash. Dernier had managed to hide his wife and son, for awhile, but there was always someone willing to sell out the Jews, even uncircumcised little boys who had never had a bris. Jackie had been marching forward longer than any of them.

It’s not until the Colonel puts them on bereavement leave—little good that will do, no body to bury and not enough alcohol in London to drown out Captain America’s screams still echoing through the mountains in Gabe’s ears—that Gabe decides he might as well use the down time to sleep.

He wakes up when he hits the concrete floor of the bunker, tangled in his sheets and desperate to get away from the _thud_ Barnes’s body makes when they cut the rope and he falls.

Monty peers over the edge of his upper bunk, eyebrows raised, but Gabe waves him away, rubbing at his neck and trying to breathe.

 

It’s Jim, of course, who’s not afraid to kick Captain America in his star-spangled ass. None of the Commandos can face Rogers for nearly a week, muttering around him at the mess and keeping their heads down. They have to face Sarge’s empty bunk every night, had to figure out where to stock up on rations and how to pay for cigarettes and how to cope with Howard Stark the way Sarge had apparently been doing for over a year.

They have to walk past the impromptu memorials on street corners in London, battered blue jackets and flowers, teddy bears and _Victory for Sgt. Barnes_ painted on signs propped up against broken lampposts. And no one has ever said the Commandos weren’t up for a fight, but—even if they can do all that—they can’t stand beside the sucking chasm of Rogers’s grief, can’t meet his eyes and suffer his side of the loss they already have to bear.

“You just gonna pine away, Cap?” Jim snaps, slamming one small hand down on the tottering bar table Captain America is slumped behind. Barnes had saved Morita’s life, in the camps, and Jim had been the terrier at his heels since, growling at anyone who came too near and biting at Sarge’s ankles the way he was doing with Steve. “Sarge died for _you_ ,” Jim snarls, because Jim knows what it means to owe Sergeant Barnes. “And you don’t give a single, solitary goddamn.”

Rogers flips over the table, flushed to his ears and looking more human than he’s done since the Alps leeched the blood from his face. “Shut the fuck up,” he shouts back, as though Jim has ever shut up in his life. “You don’t know anything. You don’t know _anything_ ,” he says again, the fight going out of him as quickly as it came, leaving Cap hunched over and looking vaguely ill.

Gabe thinks Rogers might be right about Jim not knowing. He thinks none of the other Commandos do—he didn’t know himself, until he found Steve on the train, looking as fragile as his sister when they said that her man was gone. There was no mistaking, right then, that the icy wind of the Alps had torn Rogers’s heart from his chest when it had ripped Sarge out of his hands.

“I know he’d be ashamed of you,” Jim shoots back, like he’s never learned to keep his mouth shut, like his own country hasn’t forced his parents out of their homes. He throws down one of the signs, _Victory for Sgt. Barnes_ drawn in crayon, a child’s scrawl with a bundle of violets colored underneath in vivid blues and greens. “Kids all over the Allied world are doing more for Sarge than you are. All they can do is sacrifice their crayons and their teddy bears. You can pick up a damn invincible shield, and all you’re offering Barnes is an empty bottle.” He kicks one of the bottles that had fallen off the table, but Steve doesn’t notice, too busy tracing the letters of Barnes’s name with bloodshot eyes.

“I don’t want victory,” Rogers finally says, meeting their eyes for the first time since the train, spitting the word as if ‘victory’ tastes like defeat.

Gabe thinks about Sarge’s laughter, the first time Dum Dum had said that Captain America sure was eager to start shooting. “Steve doesn’t want to kill anyone,” Sarge had told them, shaking his head and smiling into a past the Commandos couldn’t see. “He just wants the right guy to win.” And Gabe knows exactly when Sarge’s Steve died, hanging off the side of a train.

“You want to sit here and pickle your liver?” Jim wonders sarcastically, but even he can see the promise of blood in Cap’s eyes.

“I want vengeance,” Cap tells them, rolling the word off his tongue, offering them a smile that would have frightened saner men. “I want them to _burn_.”

He stalks out of the bar, flinching only a little at the first sun he’s seen in a week, and none of them are sane enough to not follow. “ _Finally_ ,” Jim mutters, and Dum Dum holds up a half-full bottle of gin in a toast.

 

That night, Gabe dreams of the woods in Georgia, six years old and holding Moses’s shoes. He wakes up, panting, when his uncle knocks on the door to his sister’s place and it swings open to reveal Steve’s face, blue eyes burning with hellfire as they carry in the dead.

He pretends it’s Cap’s screaming that wakes him, seconds later when a cracked voice shrieks, “No! _Noo!_ ” from the room across the hall and all the Commandos roll out of their bunks and onto their feet, ready for action and unsure what to do.

“Warm milk?” Monty suggests, one thin eyebrow raised, smirking at the absurdity of his own advice.

“Maps,” Jackie says, already gathering up the intel they’d been working on earlier that evening, maps and tactics spread across the untouched sheets on Sarge’s bed. “Plans.”

“Vengeance,” Jim corrects him, and smiles.

“ _Coffee_ ,” Dugan groans, scratching at his stomach and yawning wide. “I’ll go wake the cook, and Stark, while I’m there.”

They send Gabe in first, too scared to go in and have to look Rogers in the face, arguing that Gabe saw him on the train, so it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before. Steve is already awake: sitting on the concrete floor in his shorts, breaking down and cleaning Sarge’s rifle like he’ll find Barnes in the metallic grooves.

Gabe supposes the others are right. He has seen this look before, in the fractured planes of his sister’s face just before she’d died.

 

“How are we supposed to get any shut eye with all this caterwauling?” Dugan complains several days later, already out of his bunk and lighting the kerosene stove to brew midnight coffee.

“Stuff cotton in your ears?” Monty suggests, gulping down the cold tea he’d left on the nightstand, knowing he’d need it before the kitchen staff were in.

“It’s not Cap I hear screaming,” Dum Dum replies, almost too quiet for Gabe to hear. He wraps his arms around his chest and tries not to shudder, thinking of the way Barnes’s tongue had swollen out of his mouth in his last dream, trying not to recall the way they’d all heard Sarge screaming in the camps when Hydra beat him beyond bearing, just before they’d taken him away.

They sleep with their boots unlaced and ready to step into, now, waiting for the alarm of Rogers’s nightmares to rouse them from their own.

“Do you think it’ll get better,” Jim asks Monty, “When the war’s finally over?” Monty shrugs, and doesn’t ask, _Better for whom_?

Gabe thinks of his sister Deborah, fourteen years older than he was, quiet and demure enough to get work cleaning the mayor’s house after her husband died, the glint in her eyes when she came home and set to work at the whetstone with her knife. “War isn’t over yet,” he says, and doesn’t add that Cap has his own war, now, and it’s not the kind that ends with a victory and troop ship home.

When they tumble into Rogers’s room he’s on the floor, waiting—sharpening his knives.

 

Gabe hadn’t remembered Moses, not till Sarge died. Nobody said his name. Nobody talked about the afternoon Sammy Roberts from the general store had fallen through their screen door, panting about a white woman—the Mayor’s daughter—out too late and Moses picking up trash in the park, right in plain view and easy to blame. Nobody talked about how Gabe had felt the air change, inside, cold despite the heat and sweat-damp of July, how he’d wailed and screeched when his daddy got dressed to leave that night, scared of being left behind.

Gabe finds Sarge’s spare boots under a cobweb and forgotten in a dusty corner under Cap’s bunk one night when they’re packing up the maps and headed back to bed until reveille forces them to start the day. Picks them up, sniffs them and gets only the smell of cement dust and disuse, where Moses’s shoes had been damp, rank with sweat and blood and terror that had curdled in the throat of a little boy. He shakes his head when Jackie asks if he’s going back to bed, tucks the boots next to Cap’s dress shoes and follows Rogers to the mess. Gabe doesn’t want to dream of Sarge’s boots, polished with blood and frozen in the ice.

 

He has to sleep, though—can’t survive without it like Cap seems to, or like Sarge would do, standing watch through the night until the bags underneath his eyes hid the cracks inside. It’s the last night of the war, though they don’t know that yet, wrapped in their plans and their maps and ready for the midnight call to arms that takes them across the hall and into the brimstone of their Captain’s grief.

 It’s the last night, and Gabe is six and holding his father’s hand in the humid air of the Georgia woods, he is twenty six and holding his tommy gun with fingers frozen like the ice on top of the train. Moses is too high off the ground for them to reach; Gabe’s father has to crouch down and get Moses’s brother on his shoulders, holding the knife up high to cut him down. Barnes’s ears are bright red with the cold. They are the last part of him that Gabe sees, before he goes into the train.

Nobody noticed Gabe, now that he wasn’t wailing for his dad. He couldn’t see much, in the dark, but the moon was up and Moses’s feet were bare. He thought he saw one of the shoes a little ways away, caught in some vines, ran over and got too close just as Moses came down with a thud on the Georgia soil, his face—discolored with the cold, Barnes’s dark hair stiff with frost, the bruises on his face blending with the dark shadows that lingered under his eyes, his blue jacket the only spot of color in the driving white of the snow.

They brought Moses home to Deborah and Steve opened the door, sitting in the empty train car with his legs hanging over the edge, rocking forward like he might still lean out and catch his friend in the fall.

“What’s the knife for?” Gabe asked, seven years old and shelling peas for his grandmother while he watched his older sister test the edge of a knife he’d never seen.

Deborah looked up, body curled protectively around the long blade, and Steve’s smile glittered with the ice of Sarge’s fall. “ _Vengeance_ ,” they both said, and this time Gabe is the one to wake the Commandos with his cry.

The war ends that day, over the ocean, ends in just the way Gabe knew Cap had intended all along—but at night the Commandos can still hear Steve screaming, and even back in humid, Southern DC Gabe still wakes up clutching the frozen soles of Sarge’s boots, shivering from the cold.


End file.
